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Facebook Wants Your Nude Pics Now To Stop Revenge Porn Later

(CBS Local) - Facebook is testing a controversial new strategy they claim will help protect its users from becoming victims of revenge porn. The social media platform wants its members to preemptively upload their nude and intimate pictures to Facebook for safe-keeping.

The new program is being tested in Australia where Facebook is partnering with a small government agency called e-Safety to curb sexual images from being shared without permission.

"We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly," e-Safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

According to reports, Australians who believe they may have had their private photos stolen or shared will contact e-Safety. The potential victim will then be instructed to send the images to their own Facebook account via the platform's Messenger system. "They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link," Grant replied to concerns about who at Facebook is seeing this material.

"We would expect that Facebook has absolutely watertight systems to guard the privacy of victims. It is quite counter-intuitive to send such intimate images to an unknown recipient," British law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP wrote in a statement to Newsweek. Facebook claims it won't store images or videos and will only be tracking a digital footprint, known as a hash, to prevent the content from being uploaded again by someone else.

If the anti-revenge porn trial is successful, the program will reportedly move to the U.S., Canada and Great Britain in the future.